Microsoft's newest addition to the Kingdom Under Fire series really doesn't cut it.
The Kingdom Under Fire series has been a bit hit and miss. The old Kingdom under fire games took the typical hack-and-slash and added an RTS element to the mix. It had great art direction and in dephth, strategy and gameplay elements. Bluside did away with the RTS aspects for this newest iteration of the series.
Cicle of Doom still retains the great visual design of the series but is more focused on fast action gameplay. This was no doubt an attempt to make the game more mainstream. The new RPG elements are subtle and really don’t hold a candle to the robust RTS elemts of the series predecessors. The end result is a game that ends up being sort of a repetitive button masher.
In Circle of Doom you gain experience as you battle and you can choose where you spend the points to upgrade your character’s abilities. You can up your health and also get new skills and combos to learn. The problem is, in order to make use of your new skills you then have to kill a certain amount of different kinds of creatures in some very uncompelling and repetitive combat. It doesn’t help that most of the characters and enemies are clones of each other. As are the combat animations and death animations.
Graphically, the game does a good job of representing the artwork of the original episodes in the series. While the environments can look a little bland and flat, the character models are very nicely done, as are the lighting effects. The framerates can slow down a bit sometimes, unfortunately.
The sound is a mix of rock tunes and the sound effects are typical hack-and slash. The four player co-op does add some replay value to the game. Overall the whole endeavor is average at best unfortunately. I had high hopes for Circle of Doom as some of the early screenshots looked really nice. Unfortunately the sum of all the games parts end up just being mediocre in the end.
I read previously that Microsoft is hard at work to a true sequel to the Kingdom Under Fire series. I hope that they put a little more effort into delivering a more unique and entertaining game. True fans of the series may enjoy Circle of Doom immensely but I thought it just ended up being bland and average in the end.
Online co-op is really the only saving grace of Circle of Doom in my opinion. There is fun to be had here but over time it does end up being short lived.
